Fun Activities for Color Words (and a FREEBIE!)

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It’s been almost 20 days of school and I’m loving my class this year! They are hard workers, and we’ve been having lots of fun with back to school activities. One of the topics I like to cover during the first month of school are color words. I love showing them that since they already know their colors, they can learn to read the color words and become readers!!

We used one of my favorite read alouds and an activity of mine to practice our color words! We started off by reading and listening to Pete the Cat I Love My White Shoes. (I could listen to those Pete the Cat songs all day…they are so catchy!!) YouTube is sometimes blocked depending on how the WiFi in my building is feeling that day, so I found this video version of the book on TeacherTube.

Reading Pete the Cat to practice color words

After Pete the Cat, I pulled up my colors emergent reader on my interactive whiteboard, and we went through the book together. We practiced pointing and reading each sentence and used the picture clues to figure out the color words. I had them put a dot of that color in the hand.

Once we finished reading the whole book, they had to go back and write the sentences. There are 5 different versions of the emergent reader in this pack depending on your students’ writing needs.

This year, I chose to use the book with boxes for each letter. It helped them with the sizing of their letters. (I have some kids who are writing really huge and all over the place!)

I did have a couple students who used the tracing version since they are still struggling with their fine motor a bit. All they had to do was trace each sentence instead of write it on their own.

Using emergent readers to practice reading and writing color words

Once the writing was done, we got to coloring!!! Since we already went through the book together, they knew all of the colors for each page and could fill in the rest of the pictures. This activity did take awhile, so I let them leave the books at their seat all day if they didn’t finish or if they just wanted to read it again.

I love how these readers work on so many important, beginning of the year skills! We can practice one-to-one correspondence by pointing and reading the text, review color words, and practice handwriting. I told my kiddos to take this book home and read it to everyone in their house!!

Click HERE to see these in my store!

I created a freebie to go along with the emergent readers. This book is in color so it can be printed, laminated, and put together to go in your classroom library! Students can also take it home to practice reading it. You can reduce the size when printing to fit 2 pages onto 1, so students can take it with them!
Grab it HERE!

color fun activities read-trace-write-glue sentences

Another activity I’ll be using for color word review are my Read-Trace-Write-Glue sentences. Just like the emergent readers, these cover so many skills – Reading, handwriting, and sentence structure (plus cutting and gluing!)
Once we review how to complete this activity, I like using these sentences as a warm up during morning work time before they have some independent reading time.

We will continue our color word review during literacy stations by using my Colors Write the Room activity! There are 3 versions of this activity included in the pack so you can practice color words again and again! Tracing pages for recording are included, too.
I also like to keep a set of these cards in my writing station to give them extra practice.

Another activity we will use during literacy stations are my Color Word Scrambles. I love how these help my students can practice their one-to-one correspondence while working on vocabulary. I’ll leave these in my word work station at the beginning of the year, and it really helps with letter recognition and color word reading!

Don’t forget to pin it for later!